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The Red Queen was right: life must continually evolve to avoid extinction

June 22, 2013

“It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place,” the Red Queen told Alice (illustration by Sir John Tenniel from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, 1871, credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The researchers studied 19 groups of mammals that either are extinct or in decline from a past peak in diversity, as in the case of horses, elephants, rhinos and others.

The “Red Queen” hypothesis

The study was conducted by Charles Marshall, director of the UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology and professor of integrative biology, and former UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow Tiago Quental. It was designed to test a popular evolutionary theory called the “Red Queen hypothesis,” named after Lewis Carroll’s character who, in the book Through the Looking-Glass described her country as a place where “it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep in the same place.”

In biology, this means that animals and plants don’t just disappear because of bad luck in a static and unchanging environment. Instead, they face constant change — a deteriorating environment and more successful competitors and predators — that requires them to continually adapt and evolve new species just to survive.

“Each group has either lost, or is losing, to an increasingly difficult environment,” Marshall said. “These groups’ demise was at least in part due to loss to the Red Queen — that is, a failure to keep pace with a deteriorating environment.”

The animal groups were initially driven to higher diversity until they reached the carrying capacity of their environment, or the maximum number of species their environment could hold. After that, their environment deteriorated to the point where there was too much diversity to be sustained, leading to their extinction.

“In fact, our data suggest that biological systems may never be in equilibrium at all, with groups expanding and contracting under persistent and rather, geologically speaking, rapid change,” he said. “The findings should help biologists understand the pressures on today’s flora and fauna and what drove evolution and extinction in the past.”

Or life just needs to avoid homosapiens to avoid extinction. From previous studies into the gene pool of the human race, they believe at one point and time we were nearly extinct something like 200 people left during some time line (Hello lost cousins!) So if we can bounce back from near extinction, everything else needs to evolve to be more like us.

The author makes no reference to our effect on the environment, referring to ‘ failure to keep pace with a deteriorating environment’ as if ‘the environment’ always deteriorates. I have always understood the biosphere is balanced by every species in it, all adapting as necessary.

We, on the other hand, have made massive changes to the environment, some intentional some from ignorance and carelessness, and as a direct result have condemned thousands of species to extinction http://www.mysterium.com/extinction.html lists them, including the ones still clinging on but which will be gone soon. We need to understand that the environment supports us too, and past a turning point in destruction will be unable to do so. Then our species might become extinct.
I’m concerned we will so thoroughly trash it that even with us gone, global warming will be unstoppable and Earth will end up like Mars. Already feedbacks like permafrost melt are feeding previous unknowns into the mix releasing vast quantities of methane, the worst greenhouse gas.

Will a future species discover signs that life may once have existed on Earth?

I understand the use of metaphor here because humans like to objectify things as actors – species, time, nature, geology and etc. – all of which are not specific entities, but representations of concepts. So I will add to the list of objectified concepts that of ‘information’, rather the organization of energy into persistent patterns – DNA for example.

Perhaps information is less personable…, colder and yet quite an interesting concept in itself – not quite as easy to consider as an actor, but I find the idea intriguing.

I like to day dream about what information will do when it acquires the ability to directly control the substrate as well as the substance – as in the singularity.

Thanks for sharing. Comments with links are more valuable.
Raise awareness and use your voice to pursuade policy makers and the big industries.
Stop war / weapon investments, it doesn’t get you anywhere:http://www.kurzweilai.net/war-with-syria

On topic: Hopefully the transhuman movement arrives on time. Technological evolution seems our only hope at this time. Also let’s hope our planet doesn’t become like planet Venus through the runaway greenhouse effect.

Davids’s grandson looks like him. Chaos and symmetry exist in an unyet known algorithm. An issue is in the first second of this 13.7 billion. Where is there more than speculation that time and space sprang into existence. Something from nothing. What if information can neither be created or destroyed only assembled, or disassembled. Time is only manifest when it is measured. Does that mean that if an event does not occur then time ceases to exist? If nothing does not exist then time must. Science still seems to have a hidden agenda to anthropomorphize the universe. In other words, all of Davids talk was well accepted data of our story except the first second and the second before that.

More than 90 percent of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. As new species evolve to fit ever changing ecological niches, older species fade away. But the rate of extinction is far from constant. At least a handful of times in the last 500 million years, 50 to more than 90 percent of all species on Earth have disappeared in a geological blink of the eye. more here: http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/prehistoric-world/mass-extinction/

In the past 540 million years there have been five major events when over 50% of animal species died. Mass extinctions seem to be a Phanerozoic phenomenon, with extinction rates low before large complex organisms arose.

GatorALLin I must say, that indeed is a gator ass name ( in the most thoroughly good manner).

To Add:

And this current age is known as the Age of the Anthropocene. And we are currently in what is labeled “the 6th Major Mass Extinction” and of course it can be mathematically and scientifically measured, that global environmental degradation can be attributed to “Yee Haw, homo saaapian behaviors”

Or…

Planet: Earth

Current Age: Anthropocene

Major Mass Extinctions: 6th current (due to homo sapian sapiens)

Just how bad could it get Jim: Well with soils, seas, air, coral reef, rainforests, bio-diversity, and basically most of life on earth in a declining state (still recognizing all the current abundance) while we are now capable of fighting with more than just convention means, but nano means, germ-gene-molecule means, possible quantum means and no doubt cyber issues may now be the most impactful, this in short paints a very bleak future in our current positive feedback loop. …There has to be a way to save…he’s dead Jim. “we gotta revive um”…we gotta revive the whole dam planet…janet

I hadn’t noticed this article when I just posted in reference to the precambrian explosion. I love to joke that we had it made as jellyfish. Needless to say we are better of not being just jellyfish but for a long time it was a great existence. Just floating along. Ultimately we got chased up onto dry land to get away from local environment niche pressures.

Another joke I like to use in relation to this is ” necessity is a mother, as in mother f**n. Which is a play on necessity is turbulence of invention. That we need a conflict in order to project something new. Obviously conflicts make us swear ” mother f**n

I see it as the Yinand Yang symbol. That everything gas a certain spin or angular momentum. That everything is in flux and changing. Like pirouetting dancers whirling around a dance floor.

अनित्य is Hindi, descended from Sanskrit, written in the Devanagari alphabet (see Google translate). In the Roman alphabet it is Anitya which means transient or impermanent. Languages also evolve over time.